Tjalf Sparnaay amazes his audience with his hyper-realistic paintings of extremely enlarged foods. The artworks baffle viewers with their extreme precision and mastery. Sparnaay builds on the Dutch tradition of realistically painted foods from the Golden Age.Text in English and Dutch.

Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art in the twenty-first century. Realism has played an important role in art history ever since the discovery of perspective. Here, John Russell Taylor delineates the artist’s endeavor to re-create the smallest detail, from centuries before the invention of photography to the present day. This book has been published to complement a series of shows called “Exactitude” at London’s Plus One Gallery of contemporary artists working in a figurative, hyperrealist style. The diversity of such works, whether still lifes, extreme close-ups, large-scale cityscapes, landscapes, or commercial packaging, is revealed. The artists, including Pedro Campos, Clive Head, Ben Johnson, David Ligare, Cynthia Poole, John Salt, Cesar Santander, Ben Schonzeit, and Tjalf Sparnaay, come from all over the world but are united here by their meticulous approach to their work whether they are depicting people, American diners, book spines, or car engines.

Giving an insight into how this inspiring and talented artist works, The Addictive Sketcher passes on Adebanji Alade's infectious enthusiasm and will have the reader reaching for a pencil or pen to have a go. Adebanji has a skill and a passion for speaking and motivating his audience in a fun and engaging way, and this is reflected in his writing style. Lively, stimulating and instructive, it is packed with numerous examples of the author’s sketches as well as examples of his vibrant finished paintings. Covering pencils, coloured pencils, charcoal and graphite, along with finished oil paintings, this book provides a fascinating insight into the author’s techniques. Adebanji’s work covers a broad range of subjects, including landscapes, portraits, crowd scenes, urban scenes and seascapes. He’s particularly well known for his portraits and working outdoors capturing the life of London where he lives. This book includes examples from a range of subject areas.

This luxurious volume—the fourth in a series by Louis K. Meisel—is a comprehensive documentation of 21st-century Photorealism, one of the most popular art movements since the late 1960s. Photorealists work painstakingly from photographs to create startlingly realistic paintings, and where they once used film for gathering information, they now rely on digital technology, which has vastly expanded the amount of detail that can be captured. In these visual marvels they bring insights to vernacular subjects—cars, cityscapes, portraits—and make the commonplace uncommon. Illustrating the book with more than 850 works created since 2000, Meisel covers every major Photorealist still active (including Ralph Goings, Richard Estes, Tom Blackwell, Richard McLean, and John Salt) as well as remarkable newcomers. For the first time he also includes Verist sculptors such as John De Andrea and Duane Hanson.

For the past decade, Meisel has examined all the exhibitions, catalogues, books, and articles pertaining to Photorealism, and he has included every significant one here.

An adaptation of Bas Celik, a Serbian folktale traditionally told by fireplaces and burning lamps. Built from the same impossible truths that the ancients used to craft all myths, The Legend of Steel Bashaw concerns itself with a kidnapped princess, the deeds of a heroic prince, battles lost and won, death and redemption. Award-winning illustrator Petar Meseldzija brings the tale to life in this stunningly illustrated retelling.

When Obama stated that if elected, he would keep his Blackberry, debate echoed through Washington and among the ranks of the Secret Service. What would it be like to have a president who could Twitter, send text messages, and navigate the web with ease? What would it be like to receive a text message from inside the Oval Office and, most importantly, what would it say? Now, for the first time, We The People are privy to our new leader's epistolary back-and-forths on his wily hand-held device. We're about to discover that his emails (and the replies, from his wife and daughters, Biden, Palen, Rush, Hannity, the new first puppy, and even Bush) are so tuned in to the language of electronic correspondence they come hilariously close to the brink of legibility. This giftable, imagined glimpse into Obama's beloved Blackberry traverses the mundane and momentous contours of the Commander in Chief's life, from security briefings to spam, basketball practice to domestic bliss, and the panic of oops-I-hit-reply-all, to, of course, the trauma of dealing with the First Mother In Law. To wit: BidenMyTime: Hey U, whatcha doin? BARACKO: M rly busy BidenMyTime: Right :( Can I lv at 4:45?

Fashion photographer Henry Hargreaves has created an assemblage of beautiful images of the female form in a unique way--in 3D. And as you'll see in the enclosed book, 3DD is every inch what its subtitle promises: A 3D celebration of breasts. The exceptional models in 3DD appear in third dimension when viewed through the included special glasses using the classic (but newly again popular) process of anaglyph imaging. As a gift or a keepsake, 3DD will be treasured by anyone with an appreciation of the classic art of the nude female form.

An Eclipse of Moths extends Gregory Crewdson's obsessive exploration of the small-town, postindustrial American landscape. Each of these sixteen, never-before-published images is composed at a cinematic scale with the artist's signature auteurial care. Downed streetlights, abandoned baby carriages, and decommissioned carnival rides set the scene for a cast of classic Crewdsonian characters--full of equal parts yearning and ennui. This collection of images is offered in a limited-edition, slipcased volume, sumptuously produced at a scale that offers an immersive experience of each of these carefully crafted scenes.

Tattoo drawings and prison portraits from Fuel's fabled archive of Russian criminal subculture This volume presents highlights from Fuel's singular collection of authentic material on this subject. Previously unpublished in its original form, this work comprises ink-on-paper drawings by Danzig Baldaev, the photographic albums of Arkady Bronnikov and prisoner portraits by Sergei Vasiliev. The selection is contextualized with insights from Mark Vincent, an author and academic specializing in the Soviet Gulag, and Alison Nordström, a photography scholar, writer and curator. The meticulous depictions of tattoos by prison guard Danzig Baldaev are reproduced in facsimile, authenticated by his signature and stamp, alongside his handwritten notes on the reverse. The paper has yellowed with age, giving the exquisite drawings a visceral temporality, almost like skin. Sergei Vasiliev's photographs portray inmates in startling intimacy. He achieves a remarkable level of trust within the closed criminal society, a strict hierarchy, where outsiders are viewed with hostile suspicion. Arkady Bronnikov's collection of photographs are shown in the albums in which they were collected. Used exclusively to aid police in their investigations, they depict a motley lineup of assorted body parts. Russian Criminal Tattoo Archiveis the only publication of primary material on this subject, highlighting the pioneering methods these three individuals used to document this unique phenomenon.